Christus Triumphans
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it up with a personal letter of entreaty. Later he would work as a proofreader in Basel to make ends meet for his wife and (ultimately) two daughters, and several of his letters from Basel contain requests for money. It is likely that a paying position lured Foxe from Strassburg to Frankfurt. On the other hand, he may merely have accepted an invitation which the Frankfurt congregation of exiles sent to all other English exiles to move to Frankfurt and unite in one great church. In any case, Foxe stayed in Frankfurt for about a year, until September, 1555. It was a year that saw that congregation rent by aserious dispute over the form of the prayer book to be used in the worship service. Foxe took part in some of the activities of that year—a year that ended just six months before the publication of Christus Triumphans.
The English exiles were not a monolithic political or ecclesiastical group. Some were royalists, some republicans; some were Calvinists, others orthodox Anglicans; and some who were conservative on one issue were radical on another. The majority at Frankfurt, led by William Whittingham, were Calvinists when Foxe arrived there in 1554, and they favored a prayer book similar to that which Calvin had worked out at Geneva. There was also, however, a party which favored the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer, which was in use at Zurich and Strassburg. A political compromise had been reached, and the prayer book in use at Frankfurt was based on the Book of Common Prayer but departed from it in several respects. In a further attempt at harmony two pastors were chosen, John Knox to satisfy the Calvinists, and Thomas Lever the conservatives. An attempt was made, moreover, to bring in Peter Martyr as a lecturer in divinity; Foxe wrote a letter in October urging Martyr to accept the invitation, but the appeal was unsuccessful. Continuing disagreement led Knox and Whittingham to write to Calvin for his opinion of the Book of Common Prayer, and his partially negative response provoked the radicals (Foxe among them) to try to adopt Calvin's liturgy. When the conservatives resisted, another compromise was worked out, and a revised liturgy, but one still based on the Book of:
Common Prayer, was adopted for a limited trial in February, 1555.
Within a month, however, the balance of power was suddently altered by the arrival of a group of conservatives led by Richard
Coxe. Once Coxe had gained control, he contrived, in a rather
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unsavory episode, to have Knox accused of treason and driven from Frankfurt; the congregation then adopted the Book of Common
Prayer. A few months later, on August 27, some twenty radicals, including Whittingham and Foxe, signed a letter of secession, and when they failed to win concessions from the majority, most of them left in September. Many went to Geneva. Foxe went to Basel.
In Frankfurt, Foxe had lived with one of the radicals, Antony Gilby, and though not a leader had himself been identified with the radical position. Although he seceded, however, he was repelled by the bitterness which led to such a breach. In a letter to Peter
Martyr he claims to have been nearly neutral and characterizes the participants as lacking charity. Foxe was not averse to bitter ideological controversy, as we know from the bulk of his writings, but he shrank from personal encounters. No doubt this was a temperamental trait, but perhaps it was in part pragmatically motivated. For one as poor as Foxe, and as dependent upon patronage, it would have been singularly unwise to antagonize people unnecessarily, and it is remarkable that, despite Foxe's forthrightness, he seldom won a personal enemy. Interestingly—and in justification of our spending so much time on this Frankfurt quarrel—within six months after leaving Frankfurt, Foxe named several Frankfurt merchants in the dedicatory epistle of Christus Triumphans. He was confessedly attempting to win their patronage, and it is possible,
I think, to see a pattern in the persons he named. The full significance of the pattern will be visible only if we consider some events which occurred after Foxe's secession.
After the expulsion of Knox, the pastor in Frankfurt was Robert Horne, formerly a chaplain to Edward VI and reforming Dean of Durham, and still basically a structural authoritarian (in 1561 he was to become Bishop of Winchester). His congregation held somewhat different views. Though they were split on the question of church structure, a majority were less conservative on that question than in their liturgical views. Accordingly, in January 1557, less than a year after the publication of Foxe's play, the congregation voted into being a "new discipline," in which the congregation was
"aboue the pastor and not the pastor aboue the churche"—in 54 Mozley, pp. 46-47.
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Garrett's words, '"'a Bible Commonwealth in which there would be no place for bishops.''®> Refusing to accept this insurrection, Horne, who was also suspected of financial mismanagement, resigned, and some of his followers withdrew from active participation in the affairs of the congregation. How well defined this division had become before Foxe seceded, or even before he wrote the dedicatory epistle to Christus Triumphans in March, 1556, and how much Foxe would have known of it from Basel is open to question. But the persons whom Foxe names seem to cover the political spectrum.
John Binks lived with Robert Horne and opposed the "new discipline" so strongly that he refused to serve the congregation after its adoption; Garrett gives no information about his views in the prayer book quarrel, but if he was in Frankfurt at the time he did not sign the letter of secession.?* Binks, then, may have been a conservative on both issues. John Escot also opposed the "new discipline" ; in the earlier quarrel, however, he had sided with the radicals and had signed the letter of secession; but he had not left Frankfurt and had, in fact, continued to live in the Kornmarck in the house of Henry
Parry, whom Knox identified as a leading opponent.?* Escot seems to have been a middle-of-the-roader. John Kelke, who also lived in the Kornmarck (with Lawrence Kent, another merchant), had been a member of Whittingham's party in the 1555 quarrel, but he had not seceded; in 1557 he signed the "'new discipline." 5? Kelke was a radical on both issues, but not enough of a radical to secede.
These three men are the dedicatees of Foxe's book. Only one major class seems to be omitted from the list—those who actually seceded— and in the nature of things no such person could be included among the society of merchants still in Frankfurt. Early in his letter, then,
Foxe seems to have corrected that omission by stating that he would have liked to include one Walton, probably William Walton, who had been a strong supporter of Knox and had seceded with Whittingham in 1555.9?
5» Christina H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan
Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938), p. 329.
56 Ibid., p. go.
ME JH Fob MG °8 Ibid., p. 202. Garrett lists two Kelkes and only tentatively identifies John as a merchant, but Roger, a student and gentleman, did not go to Frankfurt.
°° Ibid., p. 320. The identification is uncertain because William Walton (the
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Perhaps this is an accidental congruence of circumstances—and indeed one or two of the identifications are not beyond question. But it would clearly make sense for Foxe, interested for both financial and didactic reasons in gaining support for his work from more than one group, to appeal to all political factions in Frankfurt. Early in the dedication, moreover, Foxe also refers favorably to the English merchants of Strassburg, and this may have been another political gesture. As Frankfurt was, at one time or another, radical in liturgy and in ecclesiastical structure, Strassburg was a bastion of conservatism. When the first Frankfurt exiles had invited the exiles at Strassburg to join them, the latter had refused to come unless the Book of Common Prayer were adopted in its entirety. The leader of the Strassburg congregation, moreover, was
(until his death in August 1556) Richard Ponet, formerly Bishop of Winchester and still an advocate of Anglican orthodoxy. Garrett suggests that it may have been Ponet who sent Coxe to Frankfurt in 1555 to bring
Knox down.® His congregation apparently sympathized with Ponet's views, and where Frankfurt was working toward a democratic structure, Strassburg was looking to "aristocratic hegemony among the English colonies.''®! With fine impartiality, Foxe praised both.
However that may be, Foxe certainly was looking for financial support in the publication—and probably also in the writing—of Christus Triumphans. Although Garrett has shown that many of the exiles were men of some means,9? Foxe was not. Indeed, he may have been among the poorest, for he was poor in the best of times. Now, in Basel, apparently living with a number of other families in the Klarakloster, a former cloister across the Rhine from the main part of Basel, he had another mouth to feed: his first daughter, Christiana, was apparently born almost immediately after his arrival there.
Baptized on September 22, she was a small infant when Christus Triumphans was published in the following March. Presumably out of only Walton listed by Garrett) is not called a merchant; moreover, he did not turn up in any other congregation after signing the secession, and Garrett thinks that he died abroad. If so, Foxe could not name him for that reason.
60 Garrett, p. 135.
St Jhid., p. 329.
32 TUTO eile
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penury, Foxe was allowed to matriculate without fee at the University.93 There are records of financial gifts to Foxe, and letters in which Foxe solicits other gifts. But he still had to secure gainful employment.
Like his friends John Bale and Laurence Humphrey, he became a proofreader for Basel printers. Most of Foxe's work was for Oporinus, who printed Protestant tracts and Neo-Latin plays, including a number of Foxe's writings, Christus Triumphans among them. According to Strype, Foxe lived with Oporinus and was paid only bread and water for his labor, but Mozley judiciously disputes both assertions. Though Mozley speaks of Foxe's "'severe labour as proofreader," 9 it would appear that Foxe had enough leisure to do considerable writing, and we may wonder how demanding Oporinus was. As a case in point, if Foxe proofread his own Christus Triumphans, he overlooked a number of printing errors.
Among the writings which occupied Foxe at this time, besides Christus Triumphans, were a translation of a tract on the eucharist written by Cranmer (Foxe began it in Frankfurt and completed it in 1557, but it was apparently never published); a curious volume of pages, blank except for commonplace headings under which students of the University of Basel were supposed to compile appropriate phrases (1557); a translation of a work about the martyrdom of John Philpot; and the Book of Martyrs. Most of Foxe's attention, of course, was directed to this last work, and his manuscripts are filled with letters and other documents which he compiled during these years at Basel. He finished his work on it in 1559 (he had delayed his return to England following Elizabeth's accession), and it was published in Latin in August of that year by Oporinus and another Basel printer, Nicholas Brilinger.
In October of 1559, Foxe and his family (now including a one-year-old daughter, Dorcas) returned to England. He soon established a long-standing relationship with the important London printer John Daye; was ordained a priest (1560); had two sons,
Samuel and Simeon (1560 and 1568); and became famous with the publication in English of the Acts and Monuments of these latter
and perilous days (1563). But that work and those later times are beyond the scope of the present study.
83 [bid., p. 357; Mozley, p. 52.
$* Mozley, p. 53.
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Christus Triumphans The first edition of Foxe's apocalyptic comedy of Christ triumphant was published by Oporinus in Basel in March, 1556. A number of writers have listed a first printing in London in 1551; T. W.
Baldwin, singling out a reference by P. Bahlmann, thought that "the circumstantial details given by Bahlmann concerning it make it reasonably certain that [such an edition] once existed."9€ Such evidence as exists in Bahlmann's (and others') lists, however, suggests the opposite: the entry is certainly based on the title page of the 1556
Basel edition including the identification of the author as *'Anglo."
Why would an English publication of a book written by an Englishman who was still in England go to such pains to identify his nationality ?
The question is important for its implications concerning the date of the play. There seems to have been a tacit general assumption that Christus Triumphans was written shortly before its 1556 publication; but if there was a 1551 printing, then of course the date of composition is pushed back several years. Baldwin, in fact, thought the play earlier than 1551. Taking 1538 as the terminus a quo (because of the publication in that year of Thomas Kirchmeyer's Pammachius, which many scholars think influenced Foxe's play), he thought it probable that Foxe wrote it *in this university period, 1539-1545, and that he wrote it for university presentation." 9" He noted the play's allusion to Bocardo, the Oxford prison (V.2.31), and asked,
"Why this localization to Oxford?" But the reference to Bocardo proves merely that the author knew Oxford and presumably expected his audience to know what he was referring to; it does not prove that the play was written at Oxford. For a staunch protestant such as Foxe, the most obvious time to refer to Bocardo was after March, 1554, when Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were imprisoned
65 E.g., Paul Bahlmann, Die Lateinischen Dramen von Wimphelings Stylpho bis zur Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.
1480-1550 (Münster, 1893), p.
107. E. K.
Chambers hesitantly accepted the date but noted that Sidney Lee, in his D. .N. B. account of Foxe, could cite only Thomas Tanner as authority for it. William
Winters printed the date without question in Biographical Notes on John Foxe the Martyrologist (Waltham Abbey, 1876), p. 4.
86 Shakespere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 1947), p. 3539:020. Pa354-
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there. Baldwin rejected the idea that Foxe had those protestant martyrs in mind, pointing out from other references to Bocardo that the Oxford prison was notorious before it received its most famous occupants. The very structure and purpose of Foxe's play, however, make an association with Latimer and Ridley almost inescapable.
Though his chronicle traces Ecclesia's tribulations through millennia of persecutions, by Act V she has become identified with the English church's suffering under Mary.® Hierologus and Theosebes are seized by agents of the pope, Pseudamnus,'and the only real question is whether the reference is to the arrest of Latimer and Ridley in March, 1554, or to their execution on October 16, 1555. If taken literally, V.3.29 implies that they are still alive, for Anabasius says they are in chains (Vinctus) ; the Chorus at V.5.84 uses the same word in anticipating the joy of Hierologus and Theosebes when they hear of Ecclesia's marriage. But there is an ominousness in Anabasius' statement, and (except in eschatological terms) a pathetic irony in the Chorus', which clearly suggest that Foxe is talking of men already known to be matryrs. That there are only two men in Bocardo in Foxe's play is perhaps also significant: in fact, Cranmer was there along with Latimer and Ridley, but he was not executed until
March 21, 1556, just about the time when Cristus Triumphans was published. When Foxe was writing, he apparently knew of only two bishops' martyrdoms, not three, and accordingly he allowed
Pseudamnus to enchain only two men.
Other internal evidence makes a date very early in 1556 almost certain. The golden rose and the sword in a golden sheath which are sent to Dynastes and Dynamicum (V.3.15-16) are a clear allusion to the papal honors conferred on Mary and Philip by Julius III in a letter dated January 27, 1555.99? But this is less useful to us than the linsey-woolsey pallium sent to Nesophilus (V.3.17-18). A note by the Genevan translator of Foxe's play, Jean Bienvenu, correctly identifies Nesophilus (when he is referred to again at V.3.60) as Cardinal Pole, and the pallium is of course the symbol of an arch88 See the notes to Act V for the specific allusions which Foxe makes to events of concern to Englishmen.
89 Calendar of State Papers (Spanish), XIII, 137. Gaetano Moroni Romano said the letter was dated January 26 (Dizionario di Erudizione StoricoEcclesiastica, LIX
[Venice, 1852], 131).
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bishop's office. Pole succeeded Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. He did not receive the pallium until March 22, 1556, but he had taken over the administration of the archbishopric on December 11, 1555, when Cranmer was officially deprived.7? One could argue, perhaps, that Foxe was merely anticipating the ultimate replacement of the imprisoned Cranmer by Pole (who had returned to England in November, 1554, as papal legate after years of exile on the Continent) and was not referring to a dignity already conferred. For my part, this seems less satisfactory than the view that Foxe knew of Pole's elevation when he was writing.
If a Christus Triumphans was published in London in 1551, then, it was not the play which has come down to us, and there is no evidence that there was an earlier one. Foxe's draft manuscript of this play survives, and it contains all of the allusions cited above and must have been written shortly before March, 1556.71 It was certainly written at Basel, for it is found among the papers which Foxe worked on in Basel, not among his "Letters and Writings in [Oxford] University." The play may have been written for a university performance, as Baldwin judiciously argued, but if so it was for the University of Basel, in which Foxe matriculated in 1555.
I do not know whether it was performed there or not—or whether the stage at Basel could handle the elaborate machinery of Act V— but Foxe does refer in his Prologue to 'íspectatores noui"
(I. 3), probably meaning a young audience (though it could also refer to the recentness of Foxe's arrival in Basel); and in the Dedicatory
Epistle printed in the 1556 edition he speaks of the play as one of the exercises of his studies (see p. 209 below).
Christus Triumphans has not been kindly received by modern critics. Most have ignored it, and those who have commented on it have found it seriously deficient. C. H. Herford called it a "'strange and lurid drama" rivaling "the crudest of the mysteries in naive prolixity of form, and it must be added, in essential barrenness of thought"; he thought it crowded "with unnecessary figures,
70 See D. N. B., s.v. "Reginald Pole."
71 [t is found in British Museum Lansdowne MS. 1045, ff. 132-155v. Besides these allusions, the manuscript contains an earlier reading at V.1.38 which seems a clear reference to Mary, whose chief residence was at Greenwich: "S[ATAN].
Adsumus / E Grynwico serui Dei."
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confused in structure, unimaginative in conception, and alternately undignified and pedantic in style."?? Sidney Lee, in his account of Foxe in the Dictionary of National Biography, called it a crude and tedious mystery play." J. F. Mozley put his view more bluntly:
"the play has no poetic merit.''** Even such a biased reporter as the Rev. John Stoughton could find nothing kinder to say about this *Latin poem of considerable length, of a very different order of genius from the Divina Commedia of Dante," than to call it a "singular composition."?^ Yet it was not always thus. In 1561, Jean Bienvenu of Geneva thought enough of the play to translate it into French: except for omitting (presumably as indecorous) the scene (Il.2) in which Saul quarrels with Polyharpax, adding five scenes between V.3 and V.4 as a "petit discours de la maladie de la Messe," and making some of the language more topical (e.g., having Psychephonus call Ecclesia a "Lutherienne" rather than an Origenist at IV.8.54), it is a reasonably close translation into French verse, mostly rhymed couplets.?? In 1562, Foxe's friend and fellow exile
Laurence Humphrey, author of some prefatory verses printed in the 1556 edition of Christus Triumphans, in his capacity as newly elected President of Magdalen College asked Foxe's permission to produce the play at Magdalen. Foxe gave his permission, but there are no records to show whether it was in fact acted at Magdalen.*$
In 1562-63, it was performed at Trinity College, Cambridge."
72 Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Ceniury
(Cambridge, 1886), pp. 139, 143.
73 Mozley, p. 53.
^! "Life of John Foxe," in The Acts and Monuments, ed. Josiah Pratt, 4th ed., I (London, [1900]), 17.
7° Le Triomphe de Iesus Christ: Comedie Apocalyptique (Geneva, 1562). Bienvenu, a citizen of Geneva, was active in both politics and literature. His best-known original work seems to have been the Comédie du monde malade (1568), which I have not seen but which has been described as an allegorical satire on the various estates, especially medicine, and on current political affairs. It is said to have won him a number of enemies. See Virgile Rossell, Histoire de la Littérature hors de
France (Lausanne, 1895), pp. 55-57; and Biographie Universelle Ancienne et Moderne
(Paris, 1843), s.v. "Jacques Bienvenu." The translation of Foxe's play is summarized by the Bibliotheque du Théatre Francois depuis son Origine (Dresden, 1768),
III, 236, which compares it to Thrasibule Phénice's (i.e., Theodore de Beza's) Comédie du Pape Malade (1561) and calls it a comble de l'extravagance."
78 We know of Humphrey's request because of Foxe's reply, which survives in British Museum Harleian MS. 416, f. 140v.
7? Boas, p. 387.
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In 1579, the prose panegyric which Foxe appended to the play was translated by John Daye, and the translation was several times reprinted.** In 1590, an edition of the play appeared in Nuremberg.
And as late as 1672, the play was edited as a school text by one T. C. of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; the pages of this edition were reissued with an altered date in 1676. The editor, perhaps
Thomas Comber, later Dean of Durham," praised the play for the singular elegance of its style, worthy of scholastic emulation, and for its morality and recommended it as an instrument for teaching pupils to be grammarians, poets, and Christians: here are no pagan oaths (except when Satanic characters are speaking); no matter from Ovid's *Art of Vileness", no Plautine slaves to set a bad example by their wiles; no impurities from Apuleius, Petronius, and Martial; and no barbarisms such as the utterance of Aristophanes' frogs,
Bpekekeké£, koa£, koá£. T. C. included a crabbed poetic address to schoolmasters in praise of Foxe, whom he compared to Aesop's fox as a many-talented person (pvpwrexvirrs):
Eia, agite, o mystae ludi, qui ducitis agmen Aetatis tenerae per pascua ab amne rigata,
Jordanis potius quam Nili visite ripas.
Hicce animae ipsa salus laeto cum gramine crescit ; Hoc flumen lumen, numenque immiscet in herbis;
Reddet et hoc aptos coelique solique ad Athenas.
Mentem animamque simul luci sacrabitis altae, Quaeque phrases sugent Latium Solymamque decentes.
Ictu uno actuque sales ediscere Plauti, 78 A number of writers have incorrectly described Daye's work as a translation of Foxe's comedy itself: e.g., Wilhelm Creizenach, Geschichte des Neueren Dramas,
III (Halle, 1903), 528; and Sidney Lee, in the D. N. B. life of Foxe.
78 In response to a query by R. Inglis, the editor of V. & Q., and ser., VII (January 15, 1859), 47n., said that an edition of the Memoirs of Dean Comber
(1799), p. 68, contained the following note: "These initials were thought by many judicious persons to stand for Thomas Comber, and the intention of its publication was worthy of him; but as no memorandum of this appears among such of his MSS. as are now extant, we cannot vouch for its being brought out by him." Another possible candidate is Thomas Calvert (B.A. 1626), vicar of Holy Trinity at York until his ejection in 1662; see E. Calamy, Nonconformist
Memorials, ed. Palmer (1775), II, 582. Calvert was the author of sermons published in 1647 and 1660 and of The Blessed Few of Marocco ... the true Messias.
Now Englished (1648).
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Et Christi hisce datur. Mora quae vos, quidve timetis, Quum scriptis scriptura praeest divina prophanis?
Si tulit is punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci, Sic tulit hic punctum, qui miscuit utile sacro.
Tempus ad aeterna est bufonis sanguis Iesu Sanguine libratus. Parnassi noscere res est
Monte datum: at Zionis noscere spes est Monte datum, mundi cana ultra secla beatas.
Quid levitas? Aura est. Gravitas accedit ad auram Cum simili ac aequo. Tenerae possessio mentis
Luce sui et Christi praecludit inania mundi, Mire animam tingit, quae mane imbuta juventae,
Ad senium et coelum gratum servabit odorem.
Amputat obscaenae Foxus praeputia scenae; Baptizat Musas coeli, sine sordeque coeni,
Lympha, quae mentem mundat simul et labra purgat.
Nae catus ipse vir es, seu Romae pingere mores Seu Solymae eloquio te accingas scribere sacra:
Digne quae scribis Monumenta ac Acta vocantur.
Oh come, ye priests of the school, who lead a troop of tender youth through pastures washed by a stream, go to the banks of the Jordan rather than the Nile. Amid joyous grass here grows the very health of the soul: this river intermingles light and divinity with its herbs.
It will make men fit for the Athens of heaven and earth. You will consecrate at once both their minds and their souls to that exalted light, and they will suck phrases appropriate for both Latium and Jerusalem. In one stroke, one strike you may learn the wit of Plautus and with it that of Christ. Why hesitate? What do you fear, since divine scripture has preeminence over profane scripts?
If he who mixed the useful with the sweet won the applause, so does this one, who mixed the useful with the sacred. Time, to eternity, is as the blood of a toad balanced against the blood of Jesus. It is given by Mt. Parnassus to know things, but it is given by Mt. Zion to know hopes blessed beyond the hoary ages of the world. What is comic pleasure? Air. And tragic pleasure is just as much like the air. But the possession of a compliant mind, by its own light and by Christ's, shuts out the empty pleasures of the world and colors the soul miraculously; implanted early in youth, it will preserve its pleasing savor into old age and heaven. Foxe cuts off the foreskins of the lewd stage and baptizes the muses
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with the water of heaven, free from the filth of sin, water which cleanses the mind even as it purifies the lips. You are a wise man indeed, whether you undertake to paint the manners of Rome or, with the eloquence of Jerusalem, to write sacred things: worthily are your writings called Monuments and Acts.
It is not my purpose to refute the opinions of scholars such as Herford and to embrace those of Comber. By any but the most partisan standards, Christus Triumphans is seriously flawed. In political outlook, Humphrey and Bienvenu were obvious partisans of Foxe, and Comber's bias is suggested by his association with Sidney
Sussex, "nursery of Puritanism" as it has been called and the college of Oliver Cromwell. Echoes of Horace and references to Plautus notwithstanding, it is hard to believe that anything but special pleading for a political bias could have motivated Comber's praise of the play for its elegance of style: the frequent nonclassical usages in both diction and grammar make this a curious school text. Yet even if, by modern tastes, Christus Triumphans is a bad play, it is not,
I think, so bad as Mozley thinks it. It makes even more effective use of the language of Roman comedy than Titus et Gesippus does in the creation of some very vital dialogue. If it contains some hopeless lines such as Maria's "Quidue os saliua distillans composita ?"
(I.2.12) and some hopeless scenes such as the theological discussion between Ecclesia and Paul (III.5), it also has some effective speeches
(less of the action depends on soliloquies than in Titus et Gesippus) and some effective scenes (for instance, the opening of V.2, with Psychephonus timorously saying his spurious prayers to prevent exposure even though the characters who have entered are his allies; or the opening of IV.4, in which Satan bounds onto the stage expecting to be exuberantly welcomed only to find the stage empty.)
If honorable characters (e.g., Europus and Africus, not to mention Ecclesia herself) are flat and uninteresting—a trait not unique to this play—many of the villains are considerably more than stereotypes. There are perhaps too many characters for theatrical effectiveness, but few if any of them are unnecessary for what Foxe had in mind. As he confesses in his Prologue, this is a big play with a very wide scope. Part of the reason the play fails for us is that Foxe attempted to do too much. In his dedicatory epistle he states his aim as to follow the Apocalyptic history and *'to transfer as far as possible
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from the sacred writings into the theater those things which pertain primarily to ecclesiastical affairs"— in other words to write a chronicle history based upon Apocalypse; in the draft version he called the work history. Accordingly, he telescopes within a few moments in Act I the fall of Satan from heaven and the redemption of Christ (and recalls the fall of man as though it were a recent occurrence), and in subsequent acts moves swiftly through fifteen hundred years to the reign of Mary, unabashedly noting the passing of a millennium between Acts I and IV and the passing of three hundred years within a handful of scenes in Act III. Though Ecclesia remains the central figure throughout, she is exposed to a wide variety of enemies, and she represents at various times the pre-Christian church, the early post-Christian church, and finally the English church—all of these being one true church, of course, but the oneness gets clouded over. Despite this major flaw, the play provides some pleasures, at least to the reader: some of the comic scenes are effective in themselves, and there is the overall pleasure of detecting the meaning of Foxe's allegorical representations. Whether this pleasure is a proper dramatic pleasure is no doubt open to debate, but Christus Triumphans is not the only play which has attempted to appeal to that pleasure: in the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht's
Arturo Ut, for instance, is an allegory similar in some limited ways to Foxe's play.
But our main interest in Christus Triumphans is certain to be historical rather than esthetic. Whatever we may think of the play, it merits some of our attention because it won the praise of men in three countries and two centuries, and must therefore represent some part of the critical current of its time. Besides that, Christus
Triumphans belongs to a class of plays which hold no small place in a transitional period of English drama.
Herford and others are certainly right in comparing Christus Triumphans to the mysteries. The telescoping of time mentioned above (perhaps what Herford meant by the phrase naive prolixity of form") clearly recalls medieval drama. The source of the play is
Biblical: as the subtitle indicates, the major source is the Book of Apocalypse, especially Chapters 12-13 and 17-21; significant portions of the second and third acts are taken from the Book of Acts. This Biblical material, moreover, is amplified in ways familiar
INTRODUCTION
from the old mystery plays. Saul is provided with a motive for going to Damascus to persecute Christians and with a dramatic context for the trip (the need to get authorization from the Jewish leaders, and then the earthy comic scene in which he quarrels with Polyharpax). Again, a comic Satan is thrown out of heaven and stands verbally (and probably physically) shaking his fist at Michael in enraged frustration. I know of no specific medieval parallels to these scenes, but the tone is not without parallel. At the other extreme, the long theological discussion between Ecclesia and Paul in III.5, based largely on Paul's epistles, had many precedents in medieval morality plays. So too did the inclusion of allegorical abstractions like Ecclesia and Psyche. Christus Triumphans is not, I think, directly related to medieval drama, but it clearly owes something to that earlier dramatic tradition.
Yet the play is not formless. T. W. Baldwin could not fit it into the five-act formula which post-classical critics derived from their analysis of Terentian comedy,9? but Christus Triumphans was divided into five acts, if not according to the method at least according to the example of Roman comedy as Renaissance theoreticians saw it.
More strikingly influential was the language of Roman comedy, for despite many late Latin words and some transliterations from Greek, there are enough Plautine phrases so that any Renaissance academic audience would have been aware of them. The purpose of the play, as the Prologue states it, is also classical: to mix profit and pleasure
(Prologue 32-33). The play is, then, a mixture of classical and medieval. The names of the characters are an interesting reflection of this mixture. The names are all descriptive of the characters' functions in the dramatic action, as many names are in morality plays; but it was also a humanist practice to name characters in this way, the difference being that the humanists used names formed from classical, especially Greek, roots. This is Foxe's method. Again, the denouement of the play, a preparation for a wedding, is a clear use of a long theological tradition inherited from the apocalyptic source and from some Roman comic practice.
Other elements in Christus Triumphans are not from Roman comedy. Despite Foxe's disavowal, in the dedicatory epistle, that 80 Baldwin, Five-Act Structure, p. 355.
INTRODUCTION
he is flagellating, *in the manner of the Old Comedy, the several types of vices and the grosser shames of the mob," parts of the play seem almost Aristophanic in their satire.
I do not know whether Foxe meant the phrase "Old Comedy" to refer to Aristophanes
(the only example he cites is the modern one of Macropedius'
Asotus) or even whether he knew Aristophanes (though Aristophanes was available at Oxford®!), but the parody of Catholic ritual in places is closer to the parody of Socrates in Aristophanes than to anything in Terence.?? On the other hand, the doleful monologues by Eve, Mary, and Ecclesia (these reminded Herford of Hecuba's speeches8?) ; the deaths (apparently) of Hierologus and Theosebes; the central concern with the persecution of Ecclesia by Jews,
Caesars, and popes; and the mingling of exalted and historical figures with mean and fictional ones—these are foreign to the classical comic tradition altogether. Some of them seem rather the matter of tragedy.
Foxe clearly knew what he was doing, for he repeatedly called attention to his indecorous mixture and at times obstrusively made his audience aware of critical theories of the drama. The subtitle, comoedia apocalyptica, is itself a mixture, and this combination of comic theatrical language and of theological language is not uncommon. The dedicatory epistle frankly yokes the dramatic "'Farewell, and applaud" and other diction drawn from dramatic theoreticians with the apocalyptic "'It is finished." The prologue confesses that Foxe is presenting sacred matters as if they were a play. The epilogical final chorus uses more theatrical imagery in alerting the audience to the "final catastrophe [on] our stage," the second coming of Christ. At IV.2.25-28, Anabasius, the messenger from hell, tells Dioctes, the persecutor, to "'play your part after the manner of the stage. As in comedies plays don't end altogether the same if the story doesn't permit it, so think of this world as a sort of drama school, where you must play the role not as you wish but as it's assigned to you." Evidently Foxe meant what he said in the Prologue,
8! See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), I, 103, 106 et passim.
82 Note the litany-like name-calling, mostly by Psychephonus, in IV.8 and the parodies of the breviary in V.1 and V.2.
83 Herford, p. 144.
INTRODUCTION
but his emphasis on dramatic imagery calls attention to the indecorousness of what he was doing by calling to mind the critical theoreticians whose rules he was violating.
This technique could perhaps have been motivated by a desire to ward off puritanical attacks on the very act of writing, or staging, plays: the Prologue, for instance, is at some pains to equate watching sacred plays with attendance at church. (We may recall Foxe's unorthodox 'fprayers" at Magdalen, which consisted of reading books rather than attending mass.) Along the same lines, Humphrey's commendatory poems obtrusively summon the readers to Foxe's
Christian play as if that were itself an act equivalent to taking up Christ's cross. But that sort of defensiveness does not explain all that Foxe did. His reference (Prologue 38-40) to the gaps and bogs and to the "warring elements" which it was impossible to tie together
1s a defense against dramatic critics, not moral ones; and the mock quarrel between Humphrey and Foxe in the prefatory poems concerns, not the appropriateness of writing plays, but the question whether this play is tragic or comic. Foxe's answer, that it is comic, is implicitly elaborated on by the Prologue's opening sentences, in which the play is called "new." It seems clear that Foxe knew he was writing neither a tragedy nor a comedy in the pure sense, but a tragicomedy.
Marvin Herrick's admirable study of tragicomedy discusses Foxe's play as an exemplar of the Christian Terence, and he emphasizes the contributions which that tradition made to the development of tragicomedy. When Foxe called his play *new," he seems to have been using what had become almost a technical term for a play which was neither tragedy nor comedy, for many Christian Terence predecessors had used the word. What they described as new" were plays having some or most of the characteristics which I have described in Christus Triumphans. It is scarcely necessary to review Herrick's lucid chapter on the development of Christian Terence tragicomedy from about 1500 on; but his summary of the process will indicate the significance of plays like Christus Triumphans in the transition from medieval to modern drama:
... the playwrights of the Christian Terence imposed the formal structure of classical comedy upon the loosely-made medieval drama, the mysteries,
INTRODUCTION
moralities, farces, and tried to purify dramatic diction by imitating the easy but elegant style of Terence. Their plays were usually arranged in five acts and developed from protasis through epitasis to catastrophe.
The Latin dialogue was conversational, often homely, sometimes lively and full-flavored, and yet literary. At the same time the authors of the Christian Terence were fully aware that they should not imitate Terence slavishly; they were trying to reform classical drama [from its immorality] as well as medieval [from its formlessness], for they believed that western
Europe in the sixteenth century needed a new kind of drama, one that was adapted to a new religion, new manners, new customs. Therefore they reformed Terence and modified the classical rules of both comedy and tragedy.... The sacred dramatists often set aside the traditional prescription that the plot of tragedy should be based upon history (res gestae) and that the plot of comedy should be a fictio. The "sacred and new comedies" were historiae from Holy Writ...
. These Neo-Latin playwrights also broke down the traditional prescription that tragic characters should be well-known, important personages while comic characters should be unknown, common folk. They freely mingled high with low.
Kirchmeyer's Pammachius, for example, has historical persons like Christ and the Emperor Julian, fictitious characters like Pammachius and Dromo, and the allegorical figure of Truth. They also carried on the medieval practice of inserting comic scenes in a serious argument...
Finally, the Christian Terence, for all its devotion to the dramaturgy of Terence, often ignored the classical economy of time and place. ... The result was a drama that was neither pure comedy nor pure tragedy, but a mixed form. The result was truly a drama novum, and an important forerunner of the modern drama.
. The plays of the Christian Terence anticipated almost every characteristic, save the pastoral machinery, of the secular tragicomedy that flourished in western Europe at the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. ®4
It is certain that Foxe knew some of the plays of Christian Terence.
In the dedicatory epistle, as we have seen, he refers to Asotus (1537), by the German Catholic author Georgius Macropedius. At III.3.10, he seems to have echoed Nicolas Bartholemaeus' Christus Xylonicus
(1531).55 He is likely to have known the plays of his fellow Oxonian *4 Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 39 (Urbana, 1955),
61-62.
85 See note ad loc.
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Nicholas Grimald, Christus Redivivus, Comoedia Tragica, sacra et nova (1543) and Archipropheta (1547), and perhaps some now lost, like
Christus Nascens. In Basel he had easy access to a large number of German Latin plays, especially in two large anthologies: Comoediae ac Tragoediae Aliquot ex Novo et Vetere Testamento Desumptae (Basel:
Nicolaus Brylinger, 1540), in which Pammachius and Christus Xylonicus are contiguous; and Dramata Sacra Comoediae atque Tragoediae (Basel: J. Oporinus, 1547); both of these printers were involved in bringing out Foxe's Latin version of the Book of Martyrs in 1559.
One of the Christian Terence plays, Thomas Kirchmeyer's (in Latinized Greek: Naogeorgius') Pammachius (1536), requires special notice. Critics from Herford to Herrick are convinced that Foxe knew and used Pammachius in the writing of Christus Triumphans.
Pammachius is a four-act play (the fifth act was unwritten, says the epilogue, because the Son of God will come and provide his own catastrophe) which attacks the papacy as violently as does Christus
Triumphans and which, like Foxe's play, is an "attempt to give dramatic form to the Protestant version of the Antichrist.''®* The Protestant version, of course, reflecting a view expressed by Luther and earlier reformers identifies the Antichrist, not with the Caesars or the Turks, but with the papacy—in Kirchmeyer's play, Pope
Pammachius; in Foxe's, Pseudamnus.
Pammachius was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in early 1545, just before Foxe left
Oxford, and he may very well have heard of it then, for it became a cause celebre when Bishop Gardiner, unhappy at the staging of such a radical play, launched an investigation into the circumstances of the production.5? Foxe's friend, John Bale, moreover, had translated the play into English.*8 The circumstantial evidence for Foxe's
86 Herford, p. 124. As Herford points out (p. 124 n.), in none of the medieval treatments does the Antichrist assume the role of Pope. Leicester Bradner calls to my attention another play, of interest because it was translated in 1550 by Thomas
Hoby of Cambridge, in which the Pope is found to be the Antichrist: Francesco Negri's Libero Arbitrio (1546). Hoby's translation was not published; a translation by Henry Cheeke (S.T.C. 18419) entitled Freewyl was published ca. 1573. The details of the play, which has a number of morality-type characters (Lady Grace
Justifying, King Freewyll, Dame Falsehood), are not like those in Christus Triumphans, but the author's interest parallels Foxe's.
87 Herford, pp. 129-131; Boas, pp. 22-23.
88 Herford, p. 131. The translation, done before 1548, has not survived. Bale's Kyng Johann is usually thought to have been strongly influenced by Pammachius.